If there ever was any promise of agreement on federal energy and climate legislation, it withered on the vine in Spring’s perfect storm of fossil fuel disasters. The just-released Kerry-Lieberman bill, 1,000 pages long and promising something for everybody, is now unlikely to ease the impending deadlock.
Fossil fuel supporters are dug in for the duration, desperately working to spin the greed-driven neglect that produced a coal mine human atrocity and an offshore oil rig human and environmental atrocity into some kind of perverse learning experience. The most vociferous environmental advocates are ready to respond: Hitler’s holocaust was a perverse learning experience, too, and the lesson was “Never again!”
While only the most adamant at the ends of the spectrum will raise a loud clamor in these days of Arizonan xenophobia and Wall Street-inspired class-based fury, but many will find things to oppose in the just unveiled American Power Act, an attempt at bipartisanship on federal energy and climate legislation from Senators John Kerry (D-Mass) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn) that lost its Republican sponsor – Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – over the immigration issue before it was finished. There will be protests about its provisions, be they benefits for or protections from the fossil fuel industries.
This week’s Senate and House hearings on the Gulf oil spill revealed the divide: Conservatives condemned the disaster, said environmentalists cannot use this as an excuse to stop oil exploration and called for getting on with drilling. Liberals condemned the disaster, called for a moratorium, New Energy and Energy Efficiency and insisted that getting on with offshore drilling as the fossil foolish demand is unacceptable.
Although political vicissitudes are often surprising, this debate likely precludes compromises on the American Power Act that might otherwise have seen the creation of a first-ever national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) requiring regulated U.S. utilities to obtain a specific portion of their power from New Energy (NE) and Energy Efficiency (EE) by a specified year, as well as a first-ever effort to put a cap and a price on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs).
So it is worth noting a new study that examines what is possible without such legislation. Surprisingly, Beyond Business As Usual; Investigating a Future without Coal and Nuclear Power in the U.S., from Synapse Energy Economics, Inc. (Geoffrey Keith, Bruce Biewald, Kenji Takahashi, Alice Napoleon, Nicole Hughes, Lauri Mancinelli, and Erin Brandt) for the Civil Society Institute, concludes that a phased, long-term transition away from the dangers of coal and nuclear energy is both practical and economically feasible.
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